Appalachian Figures On a Sunday morning in south central Kentucky it is easy to find a worn red or brown shape note songbook on a church pew. Open to the right page and you may see a familiar chorus like “Peace Like a River,” “Tell It Everywhere You Go,” or “What Is He Worth To Your Soul,” with a small credit line at the bottom for W. B. Walbert.

Appalachian Figures In the early 1980s, readers of the Whitley Republican opened their weekly paper to find a new feature tucked in among courthouse news and local advertisements. The column carried a plain but evocative title: “Legend and Lore of Whitley County.” Its author signed himself simply as Judge Pleas Jones, a retired jurist from Williamsburg who had spent decades on county benches and, finally, on Kentucky’s highest court.

Appalachian Figures On a February night in 1954, the old Textile Hall in Greenville shook like a mountain gym during district finals. Furman was beating Newberry so badly that the score hardly mattered. What people remember is the number beside one name on the scoreboard. Selvy 100. It was the first live college basketball broadcast in South Carolina, beamed out by WFBC.

Appalachian Figures If you drive into Middlesboro after dark and happen to look up, a lighted cross still glows on the ridge above Cumberland Avenue. Local memory ties that landmark to a coal miner from nearby Fork Ridge who spent most of the twentieth century trying to preach with concrete, corrugated metal, and whatever scrap he could scavenge.

Appalachian Figures On an overcast Monday in early spring 1985, two people cutting through a familiar dumping spot along U.S. 25E near Gray, Kentucky, noticed an old refrigerator lying on its side off the road at a place locals call Gilliam Hill. When they opened it, they did not find scraps or empty jars. Inside was the body of a small red haired woman, folded into the cabinet and left among the trash.

Appalachian Figures When you drop the needle on Big Joe Turner’s “Chains of Love” or Ruth Brown’s “5-10-15 Hours,” it is easy to imagine New York bandstands, neon bar signs, and late night subway rides. It is harder to imagine Bell County, Kentucky or a Harlan County rooming house.

Appalachian Figures In the spring of 2014, a small crowd of musicians and local historians gathered at Somerset Cemetery in Pulaski County, Kentucky. They were there to unveil a grave marker for a fiddler who had lain in an unmarked plot since 1951: Leonard Rutherford. Regional news coverage and musician forums described the ceremony as a long overdue tribute to a man many old time players rank among the finest fiddlers ever captured on record.

Appalachian Figures In the official records, Verlin Talmadge Adams begins life in a place that barely shows up on most maps. The 1940 United States census and a linked World War II era index list him as born on 14 July 1918 in Burnwell, a Pike County coal camp on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork.

Appalachian Figures George Raymond Stotser was born on April 21, 1935, in Lawrenceburg, the seat of Lawrence County in southern Middle Tennessee. His parents, Garold Morton Stotser and Retha Marie Aker, had made their way south a few years earlier from the Midwest, part of a quiet migration that tied Iowa farm country to the hills and ridges of Tennessee.

Appalachian Figures On a June afternoon in 2013, friends and family gathered at Colonial Heights Baptist Church in Kingsport, Tennessee, to remember James Calvin Bird. A week later, another crowd filled Central Baptist Church in Corbin.

Appalachian Figures On many winter nights in Lexington, Kentucky fans walk into Rupp Arena, look up, and see a familiar mountain name stitched in white on a blue banner: BIRD, with the number 22. Some remember hook shots and box scores. Others only know that the jersey belongs to an older era, when a tall forward from Corbin helped carry Adolph Rupp’s program through the middle years of the 1950s.